WASHINGTON — The planet closest to the Sun had plenty of its own heat to release billions of years ago and erupted in vast river-like volcanoes that oozed around its northern pole, said a study out Thursday. For more than three decades,...

The US military is expanding its Central Asian supply routes to the war in Afghanistan, fearing that the routes going through Pakistan could be endangered by deteriorating US-Pakistani relations, The Washington Post reported. Citing unnamed...

PARIS (AFP) – Space scientists on Thursday said they could explain why spots disappeared off the face of the Sun for two years, a mystery that had challenged a mainstream theory about our star. The years 2008 and 2009 were marked by a...

WASHINGTON – A NASA spacecraft is just hours from its long-anticipated encounter with a comet, and skywatchers hope the flyby will shed light on how the comet’s surface has changed since it skimmed by the Sun in 2005. The US space...

China on Monday unveiled photos taken by its lunar probe of the moon’s Sinus Iridium, the area marked out for the nation’s first landing, highlighting the success of the mission so far. The photos of the moon’s surface, made...

6 months after oil spill, scientists rate Gulf health worse, but not fatally so Six months after the rig explosion that led to the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history, damage to the Gulf of Mexico can be measured more in increments than...

New study: Oil plume under Gulf surface is big – 22 miles long – and likely to survive awhile. A 22-mile-long invisible mist of oil is meandering far below the surface of the Gulf of Mexico, where it will probably loiter for months...

Lawmakers pressed government scientists Wednesday to explain what effects a chemical used to get rid of oil will have on the Gulf’s ecosystem, even as a new report by the Obama administration characterized the effort as remarkably...

BP continued spraying large amounts of a controversial dispersant onto the surface of the Gulf of Mexico even after an EPA order to stop doing so, the Washington Post reports. According to the Post, BP used a loophole in the EPA’s order...

Last month was the hottest June ever recorded on Earth, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Thursday, amid global climate warming worries. The combined global land and ocean surface temperature data also found the...

Conditions suitable for life — most notably the presence of water — may once have existed all over Mars, the European Space Agency (ESA) has said. Hydrated silicate minerals were found by the ESA’s Mars Express and NASA’s...

PARIS Ã¢â‚¬â€ Bubbles don’t just disappear when they pop but deflate in a rapid cascade of ever-smaller “daughter” bubbles, scientists reported on Wednesday. The physics behind this bursting effect seems to hold true whether...

Appearing on no less than three major networks Wednesday, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles continued to deny the existence of oil plumes underneath the surface of the Gulf of Mexico. Suttles’ comments came despite the fact that...

Some 40 miles out into the Gulf Of Mexico, I jump off the boat into the thickest patch of red oil I’ve ever seen. I open my eyes and realize my mask is already smeared. I can’t see anything and we’re just five seconds into the...

BP engineers wrestled a cap over a ruptured well gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico, as a “furious” President Barack Obama prepared to head back to the stricken coast Friday. Remote-controlled submarines installed the cap over the...